Whether it is a supermarket or a bank lobby, the vast majority of customers do not enjoy standing in line. Customers particularly become frustrated when wait lines become unacceptably long due to insufficient number of customer service personnel, for example tellers at a bank.
At the same time, every well run business is cognizant of minimizing customer frustration. Nevertheless, most businesses do not have a limited number of personnel which are available to service customer needs during peak periods of the day. Furthermore, these business owners must also contend with low periods, during which the customer flow is minimal and hence those personnel on stuff must be assigned to other tasks.
Thus, businesses, such as banks, which have a limited number of personnel available to service customer needs, need efficient ways of monitoring their customer queues such that customer frustration within a queue wait times can be minimized, while efficient use of available service personnel can be maximized.